To Be of Use

Exploring the gripping bond between clinical depression and music.

My first depressive episode was in my early teens. Children are creatures of enforced routine, and depression fit into mine: I'd fall into it as the light failed, sometime between coming home from school and supper. My most vivid memory is of a drive through the Lake District, a gray and green landscape of slate and grass. At half past four I was looking out of the window, enjoying some of the most beautiful scenery in England. At five I was imagining that same scenery with mushroom clouds in the distance-- sheep vaporized nearer the blast zone, the car veering off the road as my parents' eyes were boiled in their sockets by nuclear fire. And so on. It sounds ridiculous-- it was ridiculous, a switch flipped in my head and I was overwhelmed by the corniest atom-age paranoia. It wasn't always the bomb, but that episode fit the routine: every evening for a month, two or three hours of crushing hopelessness until I calmed down with bed and a book. It was so absurd, in fact, that I never imagined I could be ill: I was just ashamed of being so horridly teenage.

But after that I had other bouts of depression, enough to realize I was indeed ill. My symptoms didn't generally have such lurid backdrops, though sometimes there was a trigger-- an outbreak of disease or war, something my brain could use as an excuse to claw at itself. Mostly it was the dull, loathsome symptoms familiar from accounts of depression-- the flatness of the world, the sense of narrowing possibilities, the gravity of despair that makes action so difficult. But this isn't really a piece about being depressed-- it's tedious to describe, let alone to suffer from, and besides, I'm lucky: Mine struck rarely and responded to treatment.

Depression could lead to my consuming music with an awful hunger, obsessively wringing the use out of records.

What I want to do instead is talk about depression and pop music. Because my depressive episodes had soundtracks. Along with the mushroom clouds, what I remember from that first encounter was Low-Life by New Order. Depression can make listening to music hard-- it can make doing anything hard-- so some of the emptiest parts had no soundtrack. But it could also lead to my consuming music with an awful hunger, obsessively wringing the use out of records. I plugged the self-holed gaps with music, and I bled that music dry.

Every depression is different, but when I asked people on Tumblr about their memories of music and depression, I got some amazing and moving replies, many chiming with my own experience. "It feels like listening to music that I only turn to at the worst of times in any other mood is disrespectful to it," wrote one anonymous responder. This seems exactly right. Initially, I thought it was hard to go back to my depression soundtracks because I'd vampirized those records entirely, reduced them to husks with little relevance for a healthier me. But the truth is less that I'm over them and more that I'm frightened of them: I put so much of myself into them, at such an intense time, that there's a lingering malignancy and power in them.

What music, though? I've avoided the specifics so far because I think the way I used the records was quite far removed from anything inherent in them. There are a lot of lazy associations about which music is or isn't "depressing" that have nothing to do with the kind of illness I'm talking about. Music can't cause depression, but that isn't to say it can't resonate and sometimes even help.

But let's look at the lazy links first. For a start, there's music which is theatrically miserable, a performance of sadness which can have all sorts of effects, including but hardly limited to empathizing with the gloom. Morrissey sometimes sits here, of course, but so does a lot of soul music. Tellingly, though, I became very used to people briskly telling me to ditch the Smiths because it was "sad" music, and have never once endured a similar reaction to "Drown in My Own Tears" or "Seven Rooms of Gloom". The judgement is based on cultural associations far more than content.

Songs about depression aren't uncommon, but it's rarer to find music that sounds like depression.

I adore the theatrical in music, but I hardly ever listened to that kind of thing when I was clinically depressed. Because such pop was inauthentic, one may think, and as a depressive I could see through its triviality? No, because it existed in a state of intimate distance-- it inhabited an emotion and stepped aside from it at the same time-- and that kind of empathy, for me, was impossible when I was in depression's selfish cocoon.

Songs which capture the specifics of depressive illness are a different matter, and sometimes I would latch onto these. When Manic Street Preachers' "From Despair to Where" came out, I disliked my enjoyment of it-- at all of 20 I felt too sophisticated for its stark, quotable sentiment: "I've poisoned every room in the house... I look at others as if they're drunk." But I couldn't deny that it perfectly caught the fog I'd fallen into-- that haze where it seemed like my interactions with people were false and slowed down, subject to some mysterious time delay: a symptom I learned to recognize as the onset of a depressive spell. The song became one of those I filled up, used up, and put away for good.

Recognizing your illness in a song is no different from recognizing your anger or love in one-- it's down to a lucky phrase here or there, a glint of the familiar that pulls you in. No pop song is universal, whatever its theme. A lot of music about depression, or by people who've suffered from it, leaves me cold or impatient-- not because of any fault in the music, but simply because it hasn't caught me the right way on the wrong day. Other songs I love but can't use. "I See a Darkness" is marvelous, but there's a dark swagger in it that's quite foreign to my experience of depression. But perhaps not to yours: Of all the things ill people have to deal with, the possessive demarcation of what's real illness and what isn't seems to me one of the most pernicious.

My use of pop when I was depressed interests me not just because I'm an inveterate self-diagnoser, but also because it seems like a more extreme version of how I use music all the time. People who criticize pop music for being ephemeral or disposable baffle me, because my favorite experiences with pop are often flings-- playing a song to pieces, until I don't want to hear it again and can just keep the memory. So my habits when ill were like a shadowy cousin of how I listen when well. I was just more aware-- in hindsight, anyway-- that I was using the records, not appreciating them or even enjoying them. Anything I couldn't cling to was discarded.

Bill Callahan's songs used taut, repeated guitar phrases to entrance and numb the listener... an effect that mirrored my depressive struggle to act.

Songs about depression aren't uncommon, but it's rarer to find music that sounds like depression. For obvious reasons, perhaps: As one respondent to my question put it, "If there was anything I'd listen to, it'd have to be something that goes nowhere, does nothing, just sits there inert. This generally doesn't make for good music, certainly nothing I'd listen to otherwise." But in my longest and worst illness, in 1997-98, this was just the quality I thought I'd found. The music that was most helpful that winter was dry and spartan, shut-in and private. Much of it wasn't song-based at all. Arnold Dreyblatt's Orchestra of Excited Strings was minimal, instrumental, and its aggressive flatness seemed perfect for my mood. Often it was no more than plucking individual strings again and again to give an acrid, metallic twang-- playing as scab-picking, I thought.

Dreyblatt's work also echoed the record I listened to the most that year, Smog's Red Apple Falls. Bill Callahan's songs used taut, repeated guitar phrases to entrance and numb the listener, creating a state where every lyric or melodic figure felt wrestled from the song against mighty odds-- an effect that mirrored my depressive struggle to act. And the lyrics stung too, full of impotence, impossible situations, and pathetic hopes. Callahan sung them a half-clause at a time, dredging the words up from some numb depth. "Most of my/ Fantasies/ Are of"-- the longest pause here-- "Making someone else come." He sounded abject.

Later, when I was better, I heard other Smog albums, but I would play them only once or twice. Much later, the other week in fact, I played Bill Callahan's new one, and enjoyed it a lot. His idiosyncratic approach to craft was intact. He could still be very funny. But again, I can't see myself coming back to it much, simply because it isn't Red Apple Falls. But no record could be, because so much of what I hear in that album wasn't put there by anyone who made it.

A record I do still listen to, the last from that time, is Jim O'Rourke's Bad Timing. In places, the sound of it approaches that shut-in picking I heard in Dreyblatt and Smog: Its long instrumental pieces include inert and thoughtful stretches, as if O'Rourke is deciding where they need to go next in real time. But here the music doesn't spiral in on itself, it gradually, shyly, opens out, adding instruments and melodies. It's one of my favorite and most precious records-- the sound, whether O'Rourke intended it as such or not, of feeling better.